received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he held a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Later, he was the Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison. His first collection, Sustenance, was published by New Rivers Press in 1997. Recently he has taught creative writing at Colorado State University-Pueblo.

About No Accident:

"No matter where he speaks fromthe dentist's chair, a tavern in Davenport, the lover's bed, a fast food drive-through lineAaron Anstett is always 'saying something urgent to your jugular vein' and saying it in language that consistently bewitches. These poems conjure verbal circuses of delight when read aloud: take, for example, phrases like 'missle whistling increasingly distant from its silo and signal' and 'birds woke, / practiced their racket, as, suddenly upstairs, we mastered every manner // of quackery quickly, skins' salts alchemical . . .,' either one of which could keep your tongue entertained for daysbut at the same time Anstett never lets you forget the dead-serious dram unfolding in the center ring: 'each minute a kingdom,' and the only beautiful, terrible one we may live in."Joel Brouwer

"I love the imagination, the courage in Anstett's poems. I love the music. Mostly, I admire the intelligenceand the humanity."Gerald Stern